Sometimes during an initial consultation, people will say to me, ‘I’ve always been told I’m too sensitive’. Those words have echoed throughout their childhood, their adult relationships and their working life. They may have been uttered in frustration, as criticism, or even with affection. Whatever the intention, hearing them repeatedly can leave us fearing that there’s something fundamentally wrong with us and how we experience the world.
What does being highly sensitive actually feel like?
Perhaps you cried more easily than other children. A raised voice in another room could ruin your whole day. You find tension between two colleagues almost unbearable and can’t shake it off even after you go home. Strong lighting, background noise, or the texture of a jumper against your skin registers more, and for longer, than it seems to for other people. You might be physically sensitive too to painkillers, other medication, or caffeine, for instance. You find change tricky to handle, often needing extended transition time as well as daily downtime to avoid burnout.
Highly sensitive people think deeply about the meaning of life. They tend to consider all facets of a problem and need time to process all the available information before making decisions. Conversely, they are quick to grasp the core of interpretations and are very insightful. They are intuitive and creative people, often very conscientious with a strong sense of justice.
If this sounds familiar, you may have come across the term Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) and wondered whether it applies to you. (You might be interested in the Highly Sensitive Person Scale self-test, created by Elaine Aron, which is available online. Note that this is not a diagnostic tool but intended to support self-discovery). Many people recognise themselves in these descriptions and find it reassuring to discover that they’re not alone. Yet, as with many psychological concepts, the reality is often more nuanced than a single label can capture.
Many highly sensitive people spend years being told either to toughen up or to celebrate their sensitivity as a gift. Neither response helps much, because both treat sensitivity as something to be managed rather than understood.
This post is about what being highly sensitive actually is, what the research says about where it comes from, and how the same trait can become a gift for one person and a wound for another, depending on the quality of their early relationships and the attachment experiences that shaped them.
What is a Highly Sensitive Person?
The concept was first described by the psychologists Elaine Aron and Arthur Aron in the 1990s (Aron and Aron, 1997). Their research defined a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) as someone with a stable, biologically based temperament trait known as Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS). People with this trait tend to process both internal and external experiences more deeply and respond more strongly to them than others do.
High Sensitivity exists on a spectrum. It’s neither a diagnosis nor a disorder. Nor is it a personality quirk invented by social media. High Sensitivity is a trait in the same sense that introversion is a trait: something that varies continuously across the population. An estimated twenty per cent of people fall into the highly sensitive range (Aron and Aron, 1997).
Let’s be clear about what that does and doesn’t mean. Sensory Processing Sensitivity describes how someone’s nervous system processes information: more thoroughly, more deeply, and with greater responsiveness to both the good and the difficult aspects of an environment. It doesn’t, on its own, explain someone’s whole personality, their relationship patterns, or their mental health. Nor does sensitivity in this sense equate to introversion; about thirty per cent of highly sensitive people are extraverts. The high sensitivity temperament is just one, albeit important, part of a much bigger picture, which is where the popular understanding of HSP often runs into trouble.
You may also have come across the term ‘empath’ used to describe a similar experience: someone who absorbs other people’s emotions as though they were their own. In terms of the evidence underlying these categories, they are not necessarily different names for the same thing. Sensory Processing Sensitivity is a researched, measurable trait, describing how your nervous system processes information. ‘Empath’ is a much looser, popular term that often gets used outside of the psychological literature to describe overlapping experiences: noticing more, feeling more, being affected more by the emotional atmosphere around you. The two aren’t necessarily incompatible, and it is absolutely fine to use whichever word feels true to your experience. But High Sensitivity has been studied with rigour, and knowing the difference can help you find more useful information, and more appropriate support, than the word ‘empath’ alone might.
Sensitivity can be a strength
Unfortunately, many people grow up believing that sensitivity is something they need to overcome. In reality, sensitivity often brings remarkable qualities. Highly sensitive people are often deeply empathic. They may notice emotional nuances that others miss. They frequently appreciate beauty, creativity and meaningful relationships with particular depth. They may think carefully before acting, reflect deeply on experiences and possess considerable emotional insight. The qualities that make life feel more intense can also enrich it. The aim is therefore not to become less sensitive, but rather to learn to live well with your sensitivity.
When sensitivity becomes overwhelming
Even strengths can become problematic when they exist without sufficient support. If your nervous system is constantly overloaded – if you feel responsible for everyone else’s emotional wellbeing, if you struggle to distinguish your own feelings from those of the people around you, if you rarely experience genuine rest – then what appears to be ‘too much sensitivity’ may actually reflect a nervous system that has been working incredibly hard for a very long time. Rather than trying to stop being so sensitive, a more compassionate approach might be to ask what your sensitivity has been trying to do for you. That question opens the door to understanding rather than self-criticism.
Sensitivity in relationship: why the same trait can become a gift or a wound
One of the questions I find myself asking is not simply whether someone is highly sensitive, but what their sensitivity is telling us. Temperament is part of that story. So too is the quality of your early relationships and whether your attachment needs were consistently met. For some people, sensitivity also overlaps with autism, ADHD or AuDHD, which I shall explore in a separate blog post soon. Here, I want to stay with temperament and attachment: what shapes the same trait into something that feels like a gift for some people and into something closer to a wound for others.
This is where the popular framing of the highly sensitive person, as someone simply gifted with more empathy and creativity, starts to obscure something important. In their original 1997 research, Aron and Aron found that highly sensitive adults fell into two distinct groups. One, the larger group, resembled everyone else except for their heightened sensitivity. The other, smaller group had a history of an unhappy childhood, including emotional neglect, and for this group, sensitivity appeared to make the quality of their early environment matter more, not less (Aron and Aron, 1997).
This finding sits comfortably within a wider body of developmental research known as differential susceptibility. Rather than viewing certain children simply as more vulnerable, this perspective suggests that some are more developmentally responsive to the environments in which they grow up. Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess (2009) argue that highly sensitive children, especially, respond to their childhood environments more deeply regardless of whether they’re positive or negative. Thus, a highly sensitive child raised in a sufficiently attuned home tends to flourish more than an equivalent child with a less sensitive temperament, precisely because they take in more of what’s nourishing as well as more of what’s harmful. The same sensitivity that leaves someone more exposed to a misattuned or chaotic childhood also leaves them more able to benefit from a genuinely safe and responsive one.
Sensory Processing Sensitivity itself appears to be a temperament trait present from birth, not something caused by what happened to you. But that doesn’t mean it’s completely unconnected to your history. If your early relationships were sufficiently attuned, supporting secure attachment, your sensitivity is more likely to have developed into what people usually mean by the appealing side of the HSP description: depth, empathy, creativity, a rich inner life. Richard Erskine (1998) describes a set of core relational needs: to feel safe, to be accepted as you are, and to have your experience genuinely understood rather than corrected. If those needs went substantially unmet, contributing to what many therapists would describe as attachment wounds, your sensitivity was likely to register more of that too. You didn’t just notice more. You felt the effects more deeply.
This is one reason why many highly sensitive adults I meet carry a level of shame, hypervigilance or self-doubt that feels disproportionate to what they can remember of their childhood. Nothing dramatic may have occurred. Indeed, people who experienced childhood emotional neglect often struggle to recognise the significance of their own history. But a sensitive nervous system registers ordinary misattunement more, not less, precisely because it’s built to.
In practice, this means that two people can describe remarkably similar experiences which nonetheless point to important differences. Someone with an innately sensitive temperament may find loud environments exhausting while otherwise feeling fundamentally safe in relationships. Someone whose sensitivity developed alongside insecure attachment may notice every emotional shift around them too, but that awareness is often accompanied by anxiety, anticipation, or a persistent sense of responsibility for how other people feel. The experiences can overlap; the way we come to explain and make sense of them may vary. Acknowledging that difference matters, as does finding a therapist who understands it, because it has a bearing on what kind of support is likely to help.
None of this makes sensitivity inherently pathological, or a euphemism for having been harmed. Plenty of highly sensitive people had good enough childhoods and grew into adults whose sensitivity functions largely as a strength. But when someone highly sensitive is also carrying an unrecognised history of relational difficulty, the sensitivity itself is rarely the whole story. Treating it as though it were, whether by celebrating it as a gift or by trying to talk someone out of it, tends to miss what’s actually going on.
It’s also worth being clear that High Sensitivity isn’t the same thing as Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD), the diagnosis recognised by the World Health Organization’s ICD-11 for the lasting impact of prolonged relational trauma (Brewin, 2020). The two can coexist, and where they do, both deserve attention. But carrying attachment wounds alongside sensitivity doesn’t in itself mean you meet criteria for C-PTSD, any more than having C-PTSD makes someone highly sensitive in the Sensory Processing Sensitivity sense. They’re related but distinct, and working out which is present, and to what degree, is often part of what happens in therapy.
What therapy can offer highly sensitive people
As a UK-registered relational integrative psychotherapist, working online with clients across the UK, my practice isn’t about deciding whether you fit neatly into a category. Nor do I approach sensitivity as something to fix. Indeed, I’m wary of approaches that treat high sensitivity predominantly as something to manage through strategies for calming an overactive nervous system. Of course, those strategies have their place. But they cannot help us understand why we experience the world as we do. That understanding comes from exploring our early relationships, attachment history, temperament and the ways our nervous system adapted over time.
For many people, that means recognising how sensitivity and an unmet relational need became entangled early on and discovering what it might be like to have that sensitivity finally met with genuine attunement, often for the first time in a sustained way, within the therapeutic relationship itself. However, it is also true that many highly sensitive folk need a therapist who doesn’t assume that something ‘bad’ happened and who can work with you on how your sensitivity shows up in your life, who can help you make sense of how you experience yourself and the world, in a way that allows you to live more authentically and joyfully. Michael Pleuss’s (2015) work provides empirical evidence for something that we all have probably noticed: that is, neither adverse experiences nor positive ones harm and benefit all individuals to the same degree. High sensitivity provides one way to make sense of why that may be the case.
Whatever the particular shape of the therapeutic work I undertake with my clients, the aim isn’t to make you less sensitive. It’s to help you understand your highly sensitive system, the ways in which it becomes overstimulated and experiences emotions so intensely, in order for you to live authentically without such personal cost. We want to support you to reach a point where you can enjoy your innate capacity to perceive the world with unusual depth and richness, rather than a wound you’re still protecting.
If your sensitivity also sits alongside autism, ADHD or AuDHD, or you’re not sure whether it does, I plan to write a companion piece specifically about where High Sensitivity and neurodivergence overlap and where they part company, which you might find useful too [link once published].
Who is this for?
This tends to suit people who recognise themselves as highly sensitive, whether or not they’ve used that exact term before, and who sense that the label, while accurate as far as it goes, doesn’t quite account for everything. It’s a good fit for people who are open to exploring the possibility that their sensitivity isn’t something to eliminate but something to understand.
You don’t need a diagnosis of anything, formal or otherwise, to begin. Some of the people I see find that their sensitivity is sufficiently explained by temperament and by the quality of their early attachment relationships. For others, it turns out to be part of a wider picture that includes autism, ADHD or AuDHD, which is where the companion piece mentioned above comes in. Either way, we work out what’s actually going on together, rather than starting from an assumption about which label fits.
I offer a free 20 to 30-minute initial conversation so you can get a sense of whether this way of working might suit you, with no obligation to proceed beyond that.
Garthine Walker is a UKCP-registered psychotherapist based in Cardiff, offering online therapy across the UK. She specialises in trauma, attachment wounds, neurodivergence, burnout and maladaptive daydreaming.
REFERENCES
Elaine N. Aron and Arthur Aron (1997). ‘Sensory-Processing Sensitivity and Its Relation to Introversion and Emotionality’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73:2, 345-368. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.73.2.345.
Jay Belsky and Michael Pluess (2009). ‘Beyond Diathesis-Stress: Differential Susceptibility to Environmental Influences’, Psychological Bulletin, 135:6, 885-908. DOI: 10.1037/a0017376.
Chris R. Brewin (2020). ‘Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A New Diagnosis in ICD-11’, BJPsych Advances, 26:3, 145–152. DOI: 10.1192/bja.2019.48.
Richard G. Erskine (1998). ‘Attunement and Involvement: Therapeutic Responses to Relational Needs’, International Journal of Psychotherapy, 3:3, 235-244. DOI: 10.4324/9780429479519-3.
Michael Pluess, ‘Individual Differences in Environmental Sensitivity’, Child Development Perspectives, 9:3, 138–143. DOI: 10.1111/cdep.12120.
Winnicott, D. W. (1971). Playing and Reality. Tavistock Publications.